The trees seem to crowd the path.

“They’ll say,” Bea continues, blithely unaware of my fear, “absolutely nothing. You’ll disappear, like a fart into the ether. You’ll be forgotten.”

—

Dr. Alice Augur leans back into her leather chair, which is ergonomic and stylish. She’s slim, in her late thirties. She’s wearing designer glasses and a sharp black knife of a dress. Ruby garnets at her throat, like drops of blood. “Why not turn back?” she says in a calm, smooth voice.

I shake my head. “Delaying the inevitable. They’d have been on to us the next day. There are rules. Someone calls you out, you face them.”

“I see. And this feeling of someone following you, I assume it was them?”

“Erika and the others? No. It wasn’t them.”

Dr. Augur steeples her fingers. “Someone else?”

“I can’t say.”

“Can’t, or won’t?”

“Take your pick.”

“I’m on your side, Ana. I’m here to help.”

“Are you?”

Dr. Augur lifts a pen and wobbles it between her fingers. “Ana, you can trust me. Tell me what you saw. In the trees, following…if it wasn’t the other girls…then, in your opinion, what was it?”

“In my opinion?”

“Yes.”

I shift in my seat. A rhombus of sunlight falls across Dr. Augur’s desk. I shift in my seat and stare at a pair of framed photographs. A man—intellectual-looking, darkly handsome. Two laughing kids at Euro Disney. The perfect family.

Dr. Augur rolls her pen. “This is a safe place, Ana. Nothing can hurt you here.”

“Not true. You’re trying to get inside my head. That hurts.”

Dr. Augur gazes at me, the epitome of cool. Uncrackable.

“All right,” I tell her. “But remember, you asked for this.”

She opens her palms to me, an invitation to proceed.

“There are things,” I tell her. “I don’t know what they are. I don’t know where they’re from. But they’re coming for me. I feel it. And they’re getting closer.”

“Things?” She glances around the room.

“That’s right.”

“That…aren’t from here?”

“No.”

“OK. Go on.”

“They’re watching me. I see them all the time.”

Dr. Augur frowns. “You believe people are following you?”

“Not people. I told you, things. They were there, before the fight. In the trees.”

“I see,” she says, as much to herself as to me. I imagine the cogs in her brain twitching and turning. “And…are they menacing?”

“Some are. I feel the danger pouring off them. Others seem more…I don’t know, benevolent. As if they want to warn me.”

“Warn you about what?”

I shrug and squint out the window at a bright-blue, sun-baked London—city of a thousand cranes—a half-made place, eternally under construction.

“I saw one on the way here,” I tell her.

“Oh?”